Being accurate is the least of it

Hello, POLITICO! When Editor-in-Chief John Harris announced to the staff that Joe Scarborough and I would be writing weekly columns, he very kindly called us both “intellectually honest” (thanks, John). Yet blogger Matt Yglesias took issue with the idea that intellectual honesty is anything worth bragging about.

“The whole thing to me really seems like a kind of cop-out. How hard would it really be for an editor to put out a help-wanted ad saying, ‘I want to pay you a bunch of money to write coherent English sentences without lying.’ Talk about a low bar!”

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Yglesias, who is otherwise nice about me (thanks, Matt), may have an inflated notion of how many dollars equal a bunch these days. It’s a lot less than it used to be. Supply and demand, it turns out, work with gruesome efficiency in the market for opinion. More and more people are spouting off, while fewer and fewer are getting paid less and less — or nothing at all — for it. Why buy a cow when the bull is free?

But that’s my problem. The blight of intellectual dishonesty is everybody’s problem. What is intellectual honesty? Yglesias seems to think it’s the same thing as accuracy or honesty, plain and simple. But it’s not. Accuracy means getting your facts straight. Honesty means not telling conscious or purposeful lies on questions of hard fact. Intellectual honesty is more demanding: It means being truthful about what’s going on inside your own head.

To start, you shouldn’t say anything that you don’t believe is true. But that’s just to start. Intellectual honesty means that you have a basis for your belief, that you have tested your belief against other beliefs on the same subject, that you have no blinding bias or, at least, have put bias aside as best you can. “Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”: Your views on, say, the constitutional limits of presidential war powers should not turn on which party controls the presidency. Your views on one subject should be consistent with your views on all other subjects. And if you’re going to base your reelection campaign on your opponent’s 20-year-old arrest for drunken driving, or on how his visits to Washington as a teenager (you visited once; he visited three times and even sent his mom a postcard saying he was having fun) make him too “inside the Beltway,” you need to have handy an explanation of why you believe that this is one of the most pressing issues facing voters.

These three different but overlapping concepts — accuracy, honesty and intellectual honesty — are honored by our political culture in reverse order of their actual importance. Accuracy is treated with holy reverence. Almost every day, The New York Times runs a “Corrections” column, solemnly cataloging its mistakes of the recent past. Last Thursday, for example, the Times confessed that it had given financier Steven Rattner the wrong middle initial, had miscounted the number of swamp white oak trees at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and had identified the author of a new book as a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland when he was really a professor of media and public affairs at The George Washington University. (He’ll be at Maryland next year.) And there were three more items of similar weight. (The Times ombudsman told Publisher Arthur Sulzberger to say six Hail Marys and stop running columns by Bono.)